The Social Life of Visual Data

I've been reflecting on the Nancy White's SpiderGram activity that helps you visualize the orientation of your community as a prelude to selecting the right online collaboration tool. As technology steward for an online community of practice or facilitator of a group that wants to work together online, it is valuable to do this exercise to help you get a better understanding. But, it's also valuable to do as a group exercise to spark discussion and reflection.

The amount and complexity of information produced in science,
engineering, business, and everyday human activity is increasing at
staggering rates. We must increasingly rely on computational approaches
to generate abstractions that help us to gain insights into large
collections of data. The field of visualization seeks to answer
questions about science and humanity by developing methods that
transform data into meaningful, perceptually intuitive representations.
Good visualizations not only present a visual interpretation of data,
but do so by improving comprehension, communication, and decision
making.

The goal of this course is to expose students to visualization
methods and techniques that increase the understanding of complex data.
The course will cover how the human visual system processes and
perceives images, good design practices for visualization, tools for
visualization of data from a variety of fields, and programming of
interactive visualization systems. The course is targeted both towards
students interested in using visualization in their own work, and
students interested in building better visualization tools and systems.

As the web becomes more social, data visualization and social data visualization skills will become more necessary to help us make meaning out of complexity. One of the lectures in this course was on the topic of Social Visualization and delivered by Martin Wattenberg from IBM. ( Many Eyes is one of his projects at IBM).

TrackBack

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

This concept of social data visualization sounds very interesting. I work with online communities as a consultant and always tell my clients to LISTEN to their communities and find out what has the greatest value to them and then build tools to make the experience better/easier for them. This sounds something like what you are talking about. I'd love to learn more if you have any articles/links you could shoot my direction.
Thank you.